I've got ITSADEAL and ISITME in the same fill. I think having IT in the puzzle twice is acceptable, NYT had a Friday puzzle recently with this. But does adding in IS (and the S contraction) take it too far?

If that's OK, I also have IMNO and IASSUME. Again NYT has done puzzles with I duplicated so it would seem that this dupe by itself isn't fatal, but would doing it on top of the ITS/ISIT dupe be too much?

 

Does anyone have the address of a website, which has the answers to the Friday puzzle in an easily parsable format? I would like to add the answers back into the .puz file using a program. "Diary of a Crossword Fiend" has the filled grid as a low-resolution .png file, which my OCR cannot transform, while the result of a Google search is greatly obfuscated by cheesy clickbait sites.

But now I see that the answers are omitted on purpose because Friday puzzles are now contest puzzles.

The Friday puzzles have always been contest puzzles for years.  They just didn't care about putting answers in the online solver until about 3 weeks ago.

Turns out the .puz file was not formatted correctly, causing the solution to be all Xs.

No, actually the WSJ has started removing answers out of the Friday puzzles for the last three weeks.  To make PUZ files work given this, the X's are inserted into the PUZ files as the answers.  So it's not a glitch, it's not "not formatted correctly", it's a FEATURE.  So, if you don't like that the WSJ doesn't provide answers to Friday puzzles, complain very loudly to them.  Given track record, they won't listen, but I thought I'd explain actually why this is happening.  Expect it to continue for every Friday in the future.

This guy's word list is listed on another thread... its very large and the guy has spent 10 years compiling and scoring it. Is it perfect?, no, and he knows it isn't, but its probably better than what you have, or anything you would create yourself in any short amount of time.

https://peterbroda.me/crosswords/wordlist/?fbclid=IwAR04CeR_nhEW5M7CoK6Pyc3lxtzAlD9i9nk6pYadGXWtWN9pTBNWvHCE2hk connections

When I click on the links at the bottom, it just opens a new tab with the words listed. all half a million+ of them. If that occurs for you, copy and paste into a .txt doc, save and rename the extension as .dict for Crossfire. Import and uncheck the existing lists in the Config>Dictionary area. One list to rule them all.

I too am wrapped up in making the perfect list, and the thing that I seem to be accomplishing the most in my word list compiling... is avoiding constructing crosswords. I have soo many lists, that Excel can't handle it. Working on a database solution at the moment. But I found this guy's scored list the other day and I probably should just give it up and start building crosswords with his list instead.

If you have too many lists and cannot process them, please email them to me to store the information. I need it too.